


Honesty

by foundCarcosa



Category: Fable (Video Game)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-21
Updated: 2011-06-21
Packaged: 2017-10-20 15:28:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/214219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Garth is not merely a scholar of the Old Kingdom. There is much he knows about the new one -- and its more intriguing denizens -- as well. The Baron of Bloodstone is not as difficult a nut to crack as people are led to believe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Honesty

 When the white-hot sun sinks low in the sky to flirt with the shimmering horizon, Reaver tells him things, because Reaver knows he isn't listening -- and if he is, he does a fine job of keeping his thoughts to himself.  
For the most part, that is. A well-placed, offhand comment about what a _fool_  Reaver was could do well to restore the balance between them. In those moments, Reaver remembers that they aren't evenly-yoked, that Garth will always stand a head above him simply by _existing_ , that no matter how many decades pass, Reaver will never know the things Garth knows, never experience the _oneness_  that defines and shapes Garth. In comparison, Reaver is a shell of a man, and Garth never lets him forget it.

But it was one thing to feel inadequate in the presence of a lesser man; it was another to feel inadequate in the presence of greatness.  
Greatness that kept his secrets, even though he imparted none of his own.  
At least, as far as Reaver knew.

"She never listened, you know," Reaver grumbles, fanning himself lazily and wishing for a tanned boy in a golden loincloth to do it for him. "Even if I hadn't made the choice I did, I would have... we would have... _hmph_."

"You speak of her often." Reaver's hand stills, and the heat rolls over him like a noxious wave -- but he hadn't expected a response. Garth was perched in the glassless window, lithe frame clothed entirely in white as the climate demanded. Reaver was simply nude, as his own desires demanded. Garth had arched an eyebrow the first time Reaver stripped, and then proceeded to ignore it the rest of the time. Now that was _not_  okay.  
But Garth didn't respond to things the way others did. Which is why it surprises Reaver to hear him respond to his feverish mumblings.

"Well, I suppose I do. Speak of her often." Indignation rises in his throat like bile. "She was noxious, _poison_. The way I am is partially _her_  fault, you know!"

Garth chuckles, looks back out of the window. He saw far, farther than the arid plains of Samarkand. Reaver knows this, and Reaver is unsettled.

"Now, you know I'm a staunch supporter of being responsible for one's own actions." Reaver's weak attempt at damage control is obvious, but he's already started the snowball rolling down the hill. "I _am_  responsible. But I know who I am, and I know _why_..."

"Fate." Garth deliberately swings his leg over, back into the room, and stands. Reaver stammers a bit as the Will-user approaches, but Garth speaks again. "Reaver, I've let you ramble on during the entirety of our time here. Many of your worries are completely founded -- but you are also who you are meant to be, and there is nothing to be done for it."

He perches on the edge of the bed, his hand coming to rest on Reaver's thigh -- a gesture that might have been simpler had the pale man been clothed. As it were, the heat made Reaver restless and flushed, and Garth's enigmatic _charms_  worked so much more powerfully on him as a result...  
"Concentrate on that which you can control. The source of your desires, your impulses. Think before you pull a trigger, for example. Track down the source of your flares of rage. A man that can wield control of his own emotions and desires will always be his own man. Even in the face of fate."

"Desires, emotions, rubbish," Reaver grumbles, and Garth squeezes his thigh in admonition. _Pay attention._

"Not rubbish. What are you feeling right now?"

Reaver's gaze lands pointedly on where Garth's hand lay. "Like I won't be listening to you at all if you keep your hand there."

"Exactly. And why is that?"

"Garth, come now, you know why..."

"Now is not the time to be shy, Reaver."

Indignation colours his tone, once again. "Shy, my delicate lily-white arse. I want to fuck you, Garth. Is that better?" A droll look followed these deliberately spoken words, but quickly dissolves when Garth's hand moves upward, to grasp the organ that had just begun to respond to it.

"And another might simply pass it off as you being you -- the whoremonger, the lecher. Is that right?" Without waiting for an answer, he continues, stroking the flesh in his palm with slow, nearly casual motions. "But who you want, who you _truly_  want, and those with whom you consort are not always one and the same."

"What nonsense are you carping on about now..." Reaver's annoyed to find that his voice has grown thin, his chest rising and falling rapidly whilst he attempts to regulate his breath. But Garth has said what he had to say, and he knows that the power of his words were not in their immediate reception, but in the way they sunk in and pervaded dreams and daydreams and pensive moments before dawn. Reaver would hear him, eventually. But not now. Not now.

Garth stretches out next to him on the white-sheeted bed, his expression unreadable as he regards the man beside him; he watches the way his skin flushes, from head to toe, as Garth's fingers trail over the insides of his quivering thighs. He watches the subtle ways in which Reaver, the baron, the magnate, the self-made man, submits -- his eyelids sliding to half-mast, his mouth falling open to release an involuntary moan, his thighs parting and hips straining upward. The halfhearted lust Reaver exhibited with his many conquests was pallid and impotent in comparison to this red-blooded, wanton abandon.

Reaver _wants_  him, in the truest way he can, and for that alone, Garth is willing to oblige.

When the weeks grow long and the time comes for Reaver to make his way back to chilly, decadent Bloodstone, Garth finishes what he has to say.  
"You, of all people, need not _settle_. If it does not please you, do not lust for it. If it does not benefit you, partake not of it."

And Reaver begins to insist that this is a credo by which he already lives his life -- but Garth merely lifts his chin with a ringed hand and kisses him, _hard,_  and _rough_ ,the only way in which they would accept such gestures from each other.  
"And remember that all moments need _not_ be filled with the grating sound of your voice."

When Garth receives an anonymous parcel, a glossy hardcover book with a pale, smirking face on its cover, and flips to the page held by a tasseled bookmark -- _Chapter Seventeen, in which Reaver graces the heathen land of Samarkand with his scintillating presence and so on_  -- he allows himself a dry smirk.

 _I'll keep your secrets, and you'll keep mine._


End file.
